Testimonials

"We enjoy the sausage and scrapple from Cedar Run Farm. Not only is the product great, but we are also supporting a local farmer."Alice Mason, Chestertown, MD

"We absolutely love their products. Their meats are delicious and the owners are so friendly. Cedar Run Farm has become part of our weekly routine. Highly Recommend!" Shannon & Chad Scheller, Annapolis, MD

"Cedar Run Farm has the most amazing quality and selection and is hands down the best local meat farmer in Maryland."Barret Lang, Odenton, MD

" We have been Cedar Run Farm customers for years now. It is delicious, raised well, and our favorite. They you Lew and Marilyn for feeding our farmily so well."Amelia Mitchell, Annapolis, MD

"We have been ordering beef, pork, and chicken from Cedar Run Cattle Company for over a year now. First of all, Lew and Marilyn are so accommodating, providing us with the exact order we want and promptly delivering it right to our freezer! More importantly, we cannot be happier about the selection and quality of meat. We are thankful to be able to eat delicious meat that is from animals that are raised humanely and are truly grass-fed and free-range -- and we were amazed to discover that their cattle live so long before they are slaughtered. Their meat is worth every penny -- thank you!" Terry Waldspurger, Galena, MD

A blog posted at HomesteadingAdventures.com - July 23rd, 2011

Good Bread, Good Meat, Good God, Let's Eat

I’m not sure why I know the title of this post. It’s probably from my Grampa, or maybe my Uncle Jim (may they rest in peace). It’s the name of a country song by Terry Scott Taylor. Both Grampa and Uncle Jim were prone to one-line gems from days of yore, and one or the other must have cranked out that line during super-speedy graces at many more than one meal for me to have remembered it.

“Good Bread, Good Meat, Good God, Let's Eat” springs to mind as an apt title for this post because of the just incredible food we eat here at The Mt. Misery Homestead (I just made that name up, just now – impressive, right?). And a good amount of that food comes from the spectacular Cedar Run Cattle Company in Sudlersville, Md. I buy all of our meat (plus other yummy stuff like BBQ sauces and spice rubs) from owners Lew and Marilyn Dodd.

I feel like I’d never tasted beef before I started buying from Lew and Marilyn’s farm. I’m not sure how to describe the difference between their beef and even top-grade beef you get from a butcher who gets it from a large producer. It’s like you can actually taste Cedar Run’s beef. There’s a there there, and it’s a flavor I’ve never encountered.

Cedar Run’s cattle are grass-fed their whole lives, which are many times longer than the 18 months tops that most cattle exist on an unnatural corn-based diet. Their cows graze the fields for four to five years before they give their lives to make my son’s bones strong and my taste buds happy. Maybe that’s what I’m tasting when I bite into one of Cedar Run’s delectable ribeye steaks: maturity and happiness.

Lew has been telling me for months that the farm has a small shop that’s open for business most days, so a few weeks ago, we drove the 40 minutes over to Cedar Run Farm to meet our food. At the top of the driveway, an enthusiastic young black lab lunged toward my son, dying to lick him from head to toe. Luckily the pooch was tied up, at least in the beginning, because boy is he energetic and BIG.

Free-range chickens by the hundreds scattered around us, pecking up bugs, grass and seed. My son carefully picked up an egg one of them had laid in the middle of the driveway and handed it to Marilyn. “Every day’s like an Easter Egg hunt around here,” she said, as if she really did enjoy hunting down eggs every day. I do it myself, and love it, but I don’t have a thousand chickens!

We wandered down to the pig barn, which, as Marilyn warned, was stomach-churningly stinky. That didn’t seem to deter the chickens wandering in and out. Friendly pigs lumbered over to us, shnurfing and shnuffling, the small, young ones separated from the mamas by a wall.

“Mommy! Turn around!” my son called — I don’t know how I hadn’t seen the free-range turkeys, unless I was blinded by the cuteness of a little brown pig my husband wanted to bring home. Turkeys huddling in an open-sided shed; turkeys resting under an old car; turkeys wandering in a tiny, muddy stream; turkeys striding away into a shady mini-forest as my son followed them. There were tens of Thanksgiving dinners, right there before my eyes. I admit it; in my mind I trussed one of the turkeys that was hunkered down in a dusty hollow between tree roots. Oh yeah, I’ll be getting one of those this year.

We wandered back to the farmhouse, where Lew had arrived. We chatted about the farm, how he’d grown up there, and how his 90-year-old Dad, who lived in town now, still came out to the farm to help. About how he raised his (delicious) roasting chickens – three months free-range, instead of the six weeks they got with commercial growers. About how his business model of bringing top-notch meat direct to customers through farmers’ markets and meat coops was helping him expand his fleet of delivery trucks.

I bought some farm-made kielbasa and Big Pop’s BBQ sauces, and we said our good-byes. On the way out, we stopped to visit the cows, which are really the stars of the Dodd Meat Show. This one saw us coming from across the field and made a beeline for us. She didn’t want to be touched at all, or even approached, but she was clearly interested in what we had for her. It wasn't much: mostly just thanks.

All images Copyright @ Lori Cuthbert

Note: This site can also be reached by using the address of www.cedarruncattle.com